Richmond, IN explosion documentary slated to release in April, 2008

It was April 6, 1968 in a small town nearly sitting on the border between Indiana and Ohio. I was a young boy at home with my brother and my Mom and I happened to be passing through our living room. It had a big picture window there facing the east, toward the downtown area where my Dad worked. As the documentary site says, the easygoing day changed abruptly at 1:47 pm.

On the afternoon of April 6, 1968, a huge double explosion rocked the downtown of Richmond, Indiana, killing forty-one people, and injuring scores more. The explosion and its aftermath changed the city and the lives of many of its residents forever. The documentary film 1:47 tells the story of how this devastating explosion came to happen and how the city’s ordinary – and extraordinary – residents responded to the disaster.

We felt the house shake, we three at home, and stopped there in the living room. It wasn’t a huge tremor but, in Indiana, the ground shaking is an incredibly rare event. We all turned to the window and I remember seeing the cloud rising over where I knew the downtown area was. Where Dad was. It actually was a small mushroom cloud but it looked huge to me.

The story of what happened that day has been chronicled before by local author Esther Kellner in her book, “Death in a Sunny Street” which is, unfortunately, out of print. (Thanks to E. Thomas Kemp at Kemplog for posting on this new film. One of his commenters, Doug, points to this link at Richmond’s Morrisson-Reeves Library where the book is available in their digital collection.) In the midst of some serious national strife, both racial and that caused by the Vietnam anti-war movements, the citizens of Richmond rose to the emergency and worked side-by-side in response.

We were certainly happy to see Dad that evening. The explosion totally destroyed several blocks of the downtown area but was, thankfully, far enough away from Dad’s store that he wasn’t injured. In the days that followed, we went downtown with him and I recall the devastation there.  Entire buildings I’d grown accustomed to seeing were simply not there.

Richmond cleared the debris, mourned the losses, and rebuilt. That’s a story that, up to now, was one of those local things. If you were from the area – and of the right age – you knew about it. If you weren’t, you’d never heard of it. I’m glad to see this project coming up. It’s a story that deserves a wider audience and I look forward to seeing it.